Greg Iles - The Footprints of God

"It's a simple signal brilliantly concealed," Skow said. "Trinity's sending it to over five thousand computers around the world. If that signal stops or is interrupted, any one of them could retaliate in ways we know noth¬ing about. But we can duplicate the signal, and we've already got a computer at the excavation to do it."

General Bauer closed his eyes and made a fist. He had stripped off his coat and blouse, but now he stood and began to put them on.

"We still have one problem," Skow said.

"What?"

"We can't substitute our signal for Trinity's without Trinity detecting it. We need some sort of distraction to confuse the computer for a brief period."

General Bauer fastened his shoulder holster over his blouse. "That's not going to be a problem."

"Why not? You think that when Trinity starts to merge the two models, it will be too preoccupied to notice what we're doing?"

"No."

"Then what?"

The general smiled cagily. "I like to stick with proven methods."

"What do you mean?"

"The same as before, only different."

Skow puzzled over this. "But it was Godin's death that caused Trinity's confusion the first time. Godin can't die twice."

"That's true."

Skow went still. "Jesus. Do you think you can get away with that?"

"Why do you think I haven't been arrested? The pres¬ident knows Trinity has to be stopped, but he knows he can't tell anyone that. He can't do anything from where he is without Trinity knowing about it. But I can. We can. That's why he's left me loose."

Skow nodded, but he didn't look completely con¬vinced. "If Trinity enters another period of confusion like the one after Godin's death, why won't more Russ¬ian missiles be launched by the peripheral computers?"

General Bauer shook his head. "I'm banking that Trinity's taken care of that. The merging procedure has never been tried, and Trinity doesn't want catastrophic accidents any more than we do."

"And Tennant?"

"What about him?"

"You don't think there's anything to his idea about merging a male and female model? Getting the machine to voluntarily disconnect itself from the Net?"

Bauer snorted. "You heard what Trinity said. No matter who gets loaded in, they're not going to relin¬quish control. That machine will never agree to be dis¬connected from the Internet. And so long as that's the case, we'll be under its control. It's now or never, Skow."

The general buttoned his coat and walked toward the hangar door.

"Where are you going?" Skow asked.

Bauer smiled. "To see my daughter. It's long past time for a family visit."

ADMINISTRATION HANGAR

Geli was standing outside smoking a Gauloise when her father walked up the narrow road between the hangars and stopped a few feet away from her. The general looked tired in the dawn, older than he'd looked inside under the lights. Yet his strength remained. He had the same long muscles Geli did, and his grip could make men twenty years his junior grimace. His gray eyes found hers and held them, looking across three decades of pain and anger.

"I need you to do something for me," he said. "For you," she said. "You've got some fucking nerve."

"That's why I have this job."

She stared at the chiseled face, so set with certainty. "What is it?"

"After the models are merged, I need you to kill Tennant or Weiss."

"Or Weiss? It doesn't matter which?"

"No. The death of either will throw Trinity into dis¬array. That will allow the NSA to tap into Trinity's data cable and substitute its own signal, which will fool the computers that control the missiles into thinking every¬thing is fine. After that, we can kill the power to Trinity without worrying about retaliation."

Geli said nothing.

"Will you do it?"

"Why should I?"

An ironic smile curled the general's lips. "If I'd asked you not to kill them, you'd have said you were going to zap them in the next five minutes."

"You think so?"

"I think you hate me so much that you'll do the opposite of anything I tell you to. And that's all right. Hate is a useful emotion."

Geli had learned that lesson the hard way. "Do you know why I hate you?"

"Of course. You blame me for your mother's sui¬cide."

For him to refer to it casually, as though to some unim¬portant event, offended the deepest part of her being.

He took a step closer. "You think my women and my drinking finally pushed her over the edge. But you're wrong. I loved your mother. That's what you never understood."

"'Each man kills the thing he loves,'" Geli quoted. "Remember that one? 'A coward does it with a kiss, a brave man with a sword.' You're a coward where it counts."

The general shook his head. "I've been protecting you for a long time. But it's time you knew the truth."

She wanted to scream at him to shut up, but she couldn't find the words. No man could physically attack her without paying a heavy price, but she had no defenses against her father's psychological violence.

"Your mother killed herself because you enlisted in the army. Even after all that had happened in the past, you decided to follow in my footsteps. That's what did it. That's what finally put her in the ground."

Nausea made Geli waver on her feet, but she steadied herself and held her father's merciless gaze.

"I would have told you about it before," the general went on, "but… we both know what happened."

Geli's hands shook with rage. The scar on her cheek seemed to burn, yet still she could not find words.

"You hate me," said General Bauer. "But you're exactly like me."

"No," she whispered.

"Yes. And you know what has to be done."

CONTAINMENT BUILDING

Rachel came out of paralysis at 6:50 A.M. I handed her a liter bottle of water, and she drank most of it in a few gulps. Ten minutes later, Zach Levin announced that her neuromodel had been successfully compressed and stored.

The human work was done.

Rachel, Levin, Ravi Nara, and I walked around the huge magnetic shield that protected Trinity from the MRI machine and stood before the sphere. I thought Trinity might say something profound, but its words were purely technical.

"I've linked with the Godin Four in the basement, and I've begun a comparative study of the data in each neuromodel. Much of it is redundant, especially that which represents life support functions. I shall discard most of this during the merging process."

Levin said, "Do you feel confident that this subtractive operation can be done without negative effects?"

"Yes. It should also reduce or even prevent the period of adaptive shock that followed the loading of neuromodels in the past. This subtractive process is a necessity in any case. My crystal matrix can hold a virtually limit¬less amount of symbolic memory, but my total neuroconnections fall far short of the number required to hold two uncompressed models. A great deal of culling will have to be done, and not merely of life support func¬tions. When I begin to merge the higher brain functions, it will be a matter of art as much as science. "

"How long do you expect the process to take?" Levin asked.

"There is no precedent. "

"Very well. Thank you."

The lasers inside the carbon fiber sphere began to fire into the central crystal with hypnotic speed. On the plasma screen below Trinity, numbers and mathematical symbols scrolled past at a rate beyond human compre¬hension, reflecting the machine's internal operations in language created by man but which now served no use¬ful function.

We stood mute, as though watching a meteor shower or the birth of a child. As the process accelerated, I was thrown back to my boyhood, when I'd sat before the tele¬vision with my father and watched in wonder as Apollo 11 landed in the Sea of Tranquillity. Yet what we were witnessing now was incalculably more complex than the Apollo moon shot. Godin's team had already accom¬plished a miracle: the liberation of the mind from the body. But the Trinity computer was attempting to unify what nature-in the interests of survival-had sundered long before the evolution of Homo sapiens. The male and female minds, divided by biochemistry and by millions of years of environmental pressures, would now become one. When that was done, the most powerful force on the planet would no longer exist in a sundered state, eternally longing for its opposite. Perhaps in this state of wholeness, the new Trinity could bring hope to a species that seemed incapable of saving itself from its own worst instincts.